Comments by "Nattygsbord" (@nattygsbord) on "Goteborg of Sweden - The Modern East Indiaman" video.

It was in the lower end of such a type of ship I guess. But on the other hand do I think that the importance of the European trade with China 1500-1850 has been enormously overrated, including the trade that great sea powers like Britain, Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands did. Swedens naval adventures outside of Europe could basically be ignored as they lack importance. Sweden was a great naval power, but never when it came to far distance trade or colonization. Even Denmark was much more succesful in that regard. Denmark had a colony in India and their trade with Asia was much larger than that of Sweden. So I imagine that the sea trade with China was never a large thing for Sweden, and thus were there never any real need for big ships. The Swedish East India company rather had asiatic trade as sideshow of tiny importance, while most of the economic gains came from scamming Swedish tax payers and giving money from the poor to rich aristocrats in the Swedish government that owned this company.
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@JohnOlimb The Swedish (including Finland's and northern German) market for asian products was tiny. The population numbers was not that high, and the population was poor. It was therefore more profitable to just smuggle all tea from China into Britain and sell it there. Sweden and many other countries did that. So Swedish East India company was not important. Especially not if one looks at it from a wider European perspective. The Swedish merchant navy was relatively small compared to that of the Netherlands and Britain despite Sweden had many years of peace and good access to cheap shipbuilding materials which it all had within its own borders. And after reading the Zandéns book "Origins of Globalization" can I only conclude that the trade between Europe and Asia was always very small in the amount of tonnes of goods transported each year, and the amount of ships visiting Asia. And the armounts of yearly silver inflows from America to Asia was also very limited. And trade was also mostly only done in light weight high value commodities that only rich people could afford. So aside from a rare few products was the importance of this trade very limited. Indeed, the imports of silver and copper from Japan to China and the imports of south east asian tin to indochina reduced the need of imports from Europe and America to pay for all the imports from China and India into Europe. So I think that the importance of intercontinental trade has been greatly exaggerated.
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